Page 1

Man and World

26: 239-260, 1993.

© 1993

KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Articles

A musical retrieve of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and

technology: Cadence, concinnity, and playing brass

BABETTE E. BABICH

Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, 113 West 60th Street, New York,

NY 10023

In what follows, I discuss Heidegger's analysis of the essence of modern

technology as a version of what Heidegger names Nietzsche's highest will

to power together with Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche's statement

of the nihilism of our day. I suggest that Heidegger's philosophic question-

ing of technology is necessarily foreclosed by his stylized, hermetic reading

of Nietzsche's expression of the will to power. Here I seek to read Heideg-

ger's critique of technology in the light of rather than against Nietzsche's

critique of science and culture - that is, to speak Nietzsche's language: "Out

of the spirit of music." Thus, it will be necessary to read Heidegger's

reading of Nietzsche against Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche. But this is

to say that we must learn to

read

Heidegger. Reading Heidegger against

Heidegger, as Michael Theunissen observes, is not only a necessary

consequence and preservative against, as Jiirgen Habermas contends,

Heidegger's damning political convictions, but is in fact the condition

sine

qua non

of a genuine

Auseinandersetzung

with Heidegger. 1 In the present

essay, I seek to bracket Heidegger's stylistic retrieve of Nietzsche's

philosophy of nihilism in the service of the possibility of such an

Auseinandersetzung. In

the resonance of Nietzsche's jesting reprobation of

philosophical conviction, such an

Auseinandersetzung

does not free us from

but rather exposes us to the task of learning how to read, how to think, and

- reading and thinking ourselves - how, in the end, to laugh.

Heidegger and Nietzsche reading the reader:

Cadence, conviction, return

Heidegger is read as - Heidegger is accused of- having read Nietzsche

against Nietzsche and having done so unfairly, misrepresenting his thought.

The charge is that levelled against Heidegger's philosophy in general:

Heidegger, it is said, embarks upon contradictory claims concerning

philosophers and philosophical traditions, which inaccuracy he fails to note;

240

he makes philological claims or traces etymological connections that cannot

stand up to closer, expert examination; he uses words and concepts in-

flatedly, so that his argument rises like a balloon to the heights of obscurity,

and so on. All this is particularly damning, it is thought, in the case of

Heidegger - a philosopher who matches Aristotle in condemning the entire

tradition before himself. For Aristotle, no earlier thinker had ever managed

to think the comprehensive, precise definition of a concept or a term, be that

term friendship or the nature of the good. For Heidegger, beginning as he

does from Brentano's expression of the manifold sense of Being in Aris-

totle, the tradition as a whole from the Greeks onward has failed to think the

essence of or the question concerning Being. In turn, for readers critical of

Heidegger, this failure to think Being is as nothing compared with the

meaninglessness of Heidegger's project.

I expect to be able to show why such anti-Heideggerian criticism misses

the point of Heidegger's reading of philosophy in general by considering

the rather more demanding case of Heidegger' s reading of Nietzsche. What

makes this case more demanding is not, contrary to Eric Blondel's asser-

tion, the volume of Heidegger's work on Nietzsche. Rather what is

problematic here is Nietzsche himself. 2 If any author has "made good" his

own predictions concerning his post-humous quality, his destined timeliness

for a coming era, it is Nietzsche. Where Shakespeare's sonnets are remark-

able not for their subject extolling the singular virtues of his love but for his

recurrent egoism, proclaiming the eternal potency of the poet's word,

Nietzsche is hardly the first author to promise himself a destiny. What

makes Nietzsche so unusual is not the audacity of his proclamation but the

evidence for his claim, shown again and again in spite of and not on the

terms of his readers. If some could argue that Shakespeare's immortal

words have been blurred by the amber of authority, Nietzsche remains all-

too current. This is so despite the then-timeliness, that is, the historical

context which may plainly be read, for example, from the table of contents

of Beyond Good and Evil: "The Free Spirit," "The Religious Nature," "On

the Natural History of Morals," or "Peoples and Fatherlands." Taking off

from the very German and historical circumstances of his cultural

references and themes, Nietzsche nonetheless manages to speak as a

European and is rather more untimely, continually, renewedly untimely

than can be imagined for him to have been, as Riidiger Safranski rather

credulously suggests, only a child of his "wissenschaflsgliiubigen Zeital-

ters. ''3 If Nietzsche can do this, if Nietzsche can still speak to us, if he can

thus be part of our untimely destiny, as all the evident and continuing

currency of his name suggests, one would be remiss if one did not ask how

Heidegger gets off including Nietzsche within the scheme of Western

Metaphysics?

241

What Heidegger does with Nietzsche is, of course, what he does with

other philosophers, where Heidegger's

modus operandi

routinely involves

such summary and denigrating points of departure. Accordingly,

Being and

Time

begins with double irony, that is with an ironic citation from Plato that

took Plato rather too much at his word: from then on, the battle of the giants

concerning Being is one which Plato and Aristotle incorporate but were

unable to decide. 4 Heidegger alone, it would seem, and Heidegger's

interpreters underline this point to the predictable vexation of readers with

other philosophic tastes, is the one who can restore the question of Being as

a question and follow it. Nietzsche will be read on the same misappointed

terms. Moreover, by condemning Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the

West, particularly with reference to the question concerning technology,

reading Nietzsche as the advocate of dominion

(Herrschaft)

over the earth

embodied in the doctrine of will to power and the proclamation of the

(Ibermensch,

Heidegger seems to sidestep the very confrontation he

proposes as essential for thought in general and he himself identifies as

characteristic of his lectures on Nietzsche in particular.

Yet Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche is an apposite rather than a failed

confrontation and we can see why if we consider Heidegger's own stylistic

strategy and, having adverted to it, identify its movement. Like Nietzsche

here, Heidegger explicitly addresses what is troublesome in the reading he

articulates (this is the

cadence

of his reading: where the claim is posed as it

falls, and falls out inappropriately to the ear of the reader). Like Nietzsche

too, Heidegger then pushes the dissonance of the pronouncement so that he

himself seems to anticipate - and more harshly if anything - the objections

a careful or discontented reader might make (this is the

intensification

or

conviction

of his reading: where the claim is carried to an extreme, and not

only so that there is no mistake about it). Finally, and here he departs from

Nietzsche stylistically if not modally, Heidegger retrieves the fallen, now-

charged expression for the turning of his point (this is the

recuperation

or

return

of his reading: where the first point is repeated in the direction of the

tonality to be heard, apart from but also through the ambiguity of language,

that is, thoughtful expression). To follow Heidegger, as to follow Nietzsche,

requires that the reader be prepared to think along with the thinker. Now

almost any philosophy will reward a careful reading, given attention to

what is or perhaps better

could

be meant along with the usual reading

adverting to the overlooked, the underemphasized, the misunderstood. But

Nietzsche and Heidegger for their part anticipate the critical reader's

response and that not merely as Aristotle had done, or the scholastic

tradition thereby influenced, that is, not merely

formally.

Rather than

thinking on the terms of the argument advanced of opposition formally

implicit in its expression or else contingent upon the meanings of its terms,

242

and so on, Nietzsche and Heidegger are provocative, where this last

characteristic features most plainly in Nietzsche's style.

If the stylised didacticism of the above procedure of cadence, conviction,

and return may also be found throughout Heidegger's writings, it is espe-

cially characteristic of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche. Thus where

Heidegger (notoriously) claims that Nietzsche is a thinker within (if also at

the end as the culmination of) Western metaphysics, he adverts to the

reader' s problems with this position from the start. In the first section of his

two volume study of Nietzsche then, rifled so that no one can miss the point

to be made: "Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker," Heidegger claims the

question "What is being?" as the metaphysical question par excellence and

maintains that "Nietzsche's thinking proceeds within the vast orbit of the

ancient guiding question of philosophy," that is, the question of

metaphysics. 5 The anticipatory cadence is no harder to track here than the

force of Heidegger' s claim itself reflected in the section' s title. The cadence

begins with the very next sentence: "Is Nietzsche then not at all so modern

as the hubbub that has surrounded him makes it seem? ''6 That this query is

not merely rhetorical is indicated by its intensification: "Is Nietzsche not

nearly so subversive as he himself was wont to pose?" Here the beginning

of the return follows as quickly in the next sentence: "Dispelling such fears

is not really necessary; we need not bother to do that." With this Heidegger

introduces the concession needed to understand the point of the radicality of

the first claim despite its apparent direction or anticipatory implication.

Thus if the falling out (which I am calling the cadence) of Heidegger's

claim that Nietzsche' s thought "proceeds within the vast orbit of the ancient

guiding question of philosophy, "What is being?" is the intensifying claim

that perhaps Nietzsche is less than modern, less subversive than had been

thought, the recuperation of Heidegger's position is clear in the concession

that has been more important for the very fact of subsequent Nietzsche

scholarship than almost any other expression of his thought, for with this

Nietzsche's thought is claimed neither for modern or modish nor for

subversive thought but rather for and as philosophy. 7 What is recuperated

then is patent: "the reference to the fact that Nietzsche moves in the orbit of

the question of Western philosophy only serves to make clear that

Nietzsche knew what philosophy is. ''8

Heidegger will spend the rest of his Nietzsche reading repeating this

claim along with its implications. Thus if Heidegger claims as he does that

"If in Nietzsche' s thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered

and completed in a decisive respect," we as readers not only of Heidegger

but also of Nietzsche may not dispense with the necessity of reading and

reflecting, of thinking back on what has been read as we read forward.

Thus we do not stop with the consequent continuation of the above implica-

243

tion, that is, Heidegger's own project in reading Nietzsche, wherein "the

confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought

hitherto." We may not stop there because the meaning of "confrontation" as

Auseinandersetzung, that is, as interpretation or Auslegung, for Heidegger is

itself decisive for his thought and for the thinking of philosophy. Confronta-

tion "is the supreme way, the only way, to a true estimation of a thinker."

The approximative expression is fortuitous, where for Heidegger, the

"confrontation with Nietzsche has not yet begun." In a preface written

in 1961, the confrontation is still a matter for preparatory thought, still

an issue as to whence "the "Nietzsche matter" comes and wither it goes"

which the reader may only decide in the same way, that is, by

thinking. 9

Is the point to be made here that Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche is not

as abusive as it seems - which would seem to concede the direction of a

reading rather like what I have named, as the first tack of a Heidegger-

styled cadence and in the already cadenced context then, an already deca-

dent, already intensified point posed for a recuperation: but then all too

rhetorically posed to work (that is to have any rhetorical effect)? Yes and

no. For while Heidegger does not quite force the account on Nietzsche that

he has been taken to have done, he does both use and abuse the style of

claiming against ordinary convictions to bring the force of those convic-

tions to light and thus advance the path of thought beyond such convictions.

The effect of the abuse of this tactic works against Heidegger, as against a

thinker who sought to think the complex side of truth in its ambiguity and

its mystery in what he called the clearing, the open. Thus Heidegger is

known for his obscurity. Nietzsche who sought to show his own darkness

by claiming allegiance with Heraclitus - the thinker of shadow and con-

tradiction, daimonic character, cleansing fire, and the rule of logos - is

known as the most easily understood, the most fun, the paperback, readily-

read, readily-quotable philosopher whose writings seem to work as well for

bathroom graffiti [God is Dead] as for introducing Conan, the Movie [What

does not kill me makes me stronger] as for prefacing chapters in new-age

self-help books [The two prior citations along with a selection of

apothegms on truth, destiny, and diet]. Such is fate. But I have sought to

suggest that Heidegger's problem is not that he misses Nietzsche's point.

Instead Heidegger's uses Nietzsche's insights against Nietzsche to advance

Heidegger's own project. It does not really speak against this strategy that

Heidegger was not able to completely read Nietzsche over to his own

project, that Heidegger borrowing not only Nietzsche's insights concerning

the reader for his authorial venture, his own strategic path of thinking, but

also Nietzsche's understanding of the nature of truth, should overreach

himself. It is an ancient Greek and mystical truism that condemned Heideg-

244

ger's efforts here, a truth reflecting a spirit and a vengeance both Heidegger

and Nietzsche could have admired.

Heidegger and the truth of technology

The question concerning technology is a question concerning the truth of

technology, a questioning following upon, asking after technology in its

truth as destiny. But truth, conceived esoterically as aletheia, "is in a lofty

sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing. ''1°

For Heidegger, truth is unconcealment. In thinking truth "as the uncon-

cealedness of beings, ''11 Heidegger turns to stress the concealed, prevailing

"in the midst of beings a twofold way." (WA 53) The ambiguous happening

of truth as unconcealment reveals what is, while at the same time conceal-

ing itself, which brings us to the familiar Heideggerian issue: "That which

is, the particular being, stands in Being." (WA 53) This is the realm in

which "every being stands for us and from which it withdraws." (WA 52)

The truth of technology is the address of truth, the inherently ambiguous

domain of the happening of truth. And mortal truth is ambiguous in just the

way that technology is ambiguous where both can be conceived as a

destining of revealing. The danger of technology, of Ge-Stell, here under-

stood as Betrieb and as inherent in the essence and destiny of technique is

its denial of truth and human freedom conceived as resolute attention and

openness to the realm of destining. (QT 25) This is the danger that threatens

the truth of technology and the truth of revealing. Heidegger writes:

"Enframing, in a way characteristic of a destining, blocks poiesis." [Das

Ge-Stell verstellt das Scheinen und Walten der Wahrheit.] (QT 30) What is

blocked [verstellt] is the esoteric height or "lofty ambiguity" of truth. What

is left, what remains, is the way of calculating representation, that is, truth

reduced or leveled to the impoverished singularity of the "correct:"

"Enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth." (QT 28)

This is named the extreme danger of Enframing. Yet Heidegger also says

that this very blocking, the excluding of ambiguity that belongs to the very

essence of technological precision, because it is the danger inherent in a

destining of revealing, is also the saving possibility. 12

For Heidegger, the capital perspectival precision of phenomenology

concerns the essence of truth, of manifestation as what shows itself,

phainesthai, and obscures itself in shining forth as what is revealed. The

reader has heard all this before: unconcealment conceals concealment. This

is the essential ambiguity of technology as a way of revealing that points to

the mystery of essence as such. Thus for Heidegger, "the unconcealment in

which everything that is shows itself at any given time harbors the danger

245

that man may quail at the unconcealed and thus misinterpret it." (QT 26)

What makes Enframing, as the essence of technology dangerous is, as we

have seen, two-fold. By speaking of revealing as two-fold Heidegger does

not articulate a humanism or subjectivism. What is unconcealed always

conceals, but this is not just a feature of human prejudice or phenomenologi-

cal objectivity: rather this concealment, this veiling intrinsic to revelation,

belongs to the essence of what Heidegger calls truth. Revelation is the

shining forth of what is as it is, and it is this shining forth that conceals what

remains hidden and this has nothing to do with the point of view of the one

who beholds what is thus revealed if this one is also claimed to witness

what is at it is, and not for the sake of any accurate observation.

Human beings are ever (in essence) given over to belong to the coming

to pass of truth. In this way, the "saving power" H61derlin speaks of is

expressed by Heidegger as precisely that which "lets man see and enter into

the highest dignity of his essence... Keeping watch over the unconcealment

-

and with it, from the first, the concealment - of all coming to presence of

this earth." (32) For Heidegger, what is endangered is the aletheic, poetic

essence of truth, the veiled essence of truth, an insight he has from

Nietzsche, where he can say almost as Nietzsche would: "Truth is un-truth"

(WA 55) and mean, with reference to

poiesis,

to poetry, and the poet

already named, "Truth as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in

being composed, as a poet composes a poem." (WA 72) For Heidegger, the

question concerning technology, the dangerous prospect of Enframing

reflects at every point the same conjunction between clearing and conceal-

ing. 13 As the poet composes a poem, the thinker here asks after the essence,

asks in the wake of, from out of solicitude for, technology. For Heidegger,

H61derlin's expression of the saving power

grows

from the danger:

"Whence something grows, there it takes root, from thence it thrives." (QT

28) This reflection brings us to the original expression of

techne

in its

mythical Greek beginning, as "a revealing that brought forth and hither and

therefore belonged within

poiesis."

(QT 34) In the present essay, "we are

summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power" (QT 33)

where "the closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways

into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become."

(QT 35)

It is precisely because of the reflective piety of questioning that this

summons is not to be a mysticism or an apocalyptic eschatology. The

"fostering" of the saving power in which we are to hope, which we are to

preserve, is only sponsored "Here and now and in little things." (QT 33)

What is to be done is to be done "here and now," what must be safegarded,

preserved, secured can only be advanced "in little things." Thus, "the more

questioning we become," the more "pious" our thinking, the more we may

246

forego the vulgar rule of the subject of humanism, domination, the control

of the earth. For Heidegger what we forego here returns us to the original

essence of techne, "as the bringing forth of the true into the splendor of

radiant appearing ... into the beautiful." (AT 34) The small wonder Heideg-

ger enjoins "here and now and in little things" is the very wonder that a

thing can be. Yet we may note that because of the growing purview of

modern technology, because of the ordinary distance of what is closest to

us, to talk of wonder is almost too much, too precious for us.

Like the old philosophic prejudice against poetry, Heidegger finds the

modern, rationalistic prejudice at work in the same way in his reading of

Hrlderlin's promise: "...poetically man dwells..." Heidegger's charged

anticipation, cadence, and conviction, is offered, as usual, at the start of his

essay. The phrase "...poetically man dwells .... " for Heidegger, "comes to

us by a curious route." With this initial comment, Heidegger means to read

the poem that "beings 'In lovely blueness...'" but to "restore" the phrase

"thoughtfully to the poem," the cadence and concession to the reader

affirms "the doubts it immediately arouses. ''14 Such doubts speak in the

conviction that in a harried world of housing-concerns, "dwelling remain[s]

incompatible with the poetic." In the same day-to-day world, poetry is

hardly more than "a preoccupation with aestheticizing." Thus for Heideg-

ger, "Poetry is either rejected as a frivolous mooning and vaporizing into

the unknown, and a flight into dreamland, or is counted as part of litera-

ture." (P 213) Apart from its literary function, which brackets poetry as

much as its aestheticization does, and construing poetry as imagination and

invention, as making, Heidegger recuperates the poet's phrase to the word.

Poetic diction has a precision that is not free fancy: "dwelling" is not

"housing." In the cadence conceding the convicted suspicions of the reader,

returning to the word, we may begin to see what Heidegger could mean by

speaking of the wonder of poetic saying as that which "brings the unsayable

as such into a world." (WA 74)

Only in renouncing human self-will can the human be freely "gathered"

into what is properly its own [ge-eignet], so that the human may, from

"within the safeguarded element of world.., as the mortal, look out toward

the divine. ''15 "Otherwise not;" says Heidegger, For in any other wise we

would lack the question where "questioning is the piety of thought." (QT

35) Failing to question, we fail to pose the question of thought, we fail to

hold true to the task of thinking. Thus Heidegger reminds us that before we

may ask "What must we do" we are to ask "How must we think" (QT/T 40),

where thinking is "genuine activity." Belonging to Being, "primal cor-

responding, expressly carried out, is thinking." (QT/T 41) This then is the

turning. "The constellation of Being is the denial of the world, in the form

of injurious neglect of the thing." (QT/T 49) Yet to say this is to say that the

247

world is denied and to say that, again, says nothing new to us. For the

postmodern era is nothing if it is not the era of heightened consciousness of

the jaded, of lost innocence. The world which the watchful, poetic word

preserves and here that is to say, saves, the world, the word is denied within

the reigning sphere of modern technology.

But an apocalyptic prediction of the denial of the world and language is

not all there is to say and that is why a somehow astonished Heidegger felt

it important to assure Richard Wisser during his "Television Interview" that

his thinking is not anti-technology. 16 For Heidegger, "Denial is not

nothing." (QT/T 49) Thus Heidegger's invocation and blessing - i.e., the

prayer - offered at the end of the essay on the "Turning" is a saying

following the question "What must we do?" This saying is offered precisely

where "it is the constellation of Being that is uttering itself to us," invoked

for those who "do not yet hear, we whose heating and seeing are perishing

through radio and film under the rule of technology." (QT/T 48) The

manifold question for thought, "Will insight into that which is bring itself

disclosingly to pass? Will we, as the ones caught sight of, be so brought

home into the essential glance of Being that we will no longer elude it?"

(QT/T 49) can now be unfolded into the blessing of Heidegger' s wish.

T. S. Eliot heard this connection, subscribed to us what must be done, as

task:

Then spoke the Thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed. 17

What is to be thought here is the meaning of task as what is charged, as

Aufirag. This thought can be heard from the mystical heights of H61deflin's

admission at the end of the first version of Der Einzige, "Nie treff ich, wie

ich wiinsche / Das Maas. Ein Gott weiJ3 aber / Wenn kommet, was ich

wiinsche das Beste.-18 Again, at the conclusion of the later version of

Patmos, the poem so important to Heidegger,

...Nemlich rein

Zu seyn, ist Geschik, ein Leben, das ein Herz hat,

Vor solchem Angesicht', und dauert iiber die Hiilfie.

Zu meiden aber ist viel... 19

Another more recent poet cries, "Das alles war Auftrag." Rilke claims that

the season needs us, the very stars shine only for the consecration of the

heart, the song of the violin is offered for the one who in passing

248

hears. 2°

What the violin yields is given but what is assigned, what is

charged, is set to the one who can rise to match what is given, answering

what must be given, preserving the volatile and "awful daring," - the

essence of our being for Eliot and which is "not to be found in our

obituaries" - mastering as Rilke witnesses to the angel what is assigned us.

For H61derlin, this is to catch oneself gone upon the way one is to go, arced

and cast, like

"Drachenzihne."

All the while observing in song the law that

sends one upon that course of poetic preservation, of cultivation, where like

fallen wheat

"nicht ein Clbel ists, wenn einiges/Verloren geht. ''21

"We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power." (QT

33) This dangerous prospect is neither secure nor sure. For what we do

when we "look into the constellation of truth," when we attend upon

technology in its essence, or question concerning "the constellation in

which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth

comes to pass," (QT 33) is thoughtful, recollective, meditative, poetic

watchfulness. And this is hard. What Heidegger in his essay on the "Origin

of the Work of Art" names echoing H61dedin from the start as "founding

preservation"

[stiflende Bewahrung]

and which in the essay on technology

is named in connection with being able to endure

[wiihren]

is finally

expressed as "what is granted

[das Gewiihrte]. ''31

For Heidegger this is

what poetry can do: "Projective saying

[Entwerfende Sagen]

is saying

which in preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such

into a world." (WA 74) The nature of art is in this way poetical. Thus

techne,

in its origin "may awaken and found anew our look into that which

grants and our trust in it." (QT 35)

If Heidegger can question the saving power of poetry, of art, of

techne

as

it belongs to

poiesis

to ask as he does at the end in an intensification

without a concession, without explicit return, "Whether art may be granted

this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no

one can tell," (QT 35) it is because the danger here is the danger of failing

to wait, to pose and hold the question of the most questionable. Heidegger's

final word in "the Turning" is necessarily blessing and prayer: "May world

in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the truth

of Being near to man's essence, and so gives man to belong to the disclos-

ing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own." (QT/T 49) In connec-

tion with poetry, Heidegger explains this that is "man's" own: "man is

capable of poetry at any time only to the degree to which his being is

appropriate to that which itself has a liking for man and therefore needs his

presence." (P 228)

249

Nihilism and the question of value

It is on the terms of a deliberately post-humanistic pluralism of willing

being that Nietzsche raises what Heidegger calls the question of Being,

addressing the world, the organic, the thought of being and becoming,

interpretation, perspective, and event, speaking of history and politics,

people and customs, good and evil, men, women, sexuality, and power. 22

Here, if the postmodern condition of pluralism and fluid tolerance can be

said to be good for anything, it might be expected to open our philosophic

sensibilities to Nietzsche's recollection of the world of becoming and

innocence.

The object of philosophic inquiry for Nietzsche is the desire - the will -

of everything that is. Conceived as desire or will to power, the will does not

characterize the essence of being human as distinguished from the all.

Nature or the world, in Nietzsche's celebrated formula is "will to power -

and nothing else." Nietzsche rejects the fetishistic distinction between

humanity and all other ways of being. Reflecting on his own philosophy

and its projection, Nietzsche writes "I differentiate not a philosophy of the

individual but a hierarchy, a rankordering." This ranging differentiation as

will to power is the Anaxamandrian schema of coming into being, that is, of

becoming. Presubjective or postsubjective - such becoming must be

thought as the Greeks thought it and that does not revolve around

anthropomorphic differentiation and dissolution in time, that is, the

meaning of becoming is not a vanitas but must be thought as tragic mor-

tality.

What may be named Nietzsche's elitism or hierarchic thinking (a

deliberate, willed ranking) is reflected in the schema of Will to Power and is

the essence of his philosophic project and his style. 23 A clear articulation of

the significance of Nietzsche's elitism is indispensable for an understanding

of Nietzsche's discussion of nihilism and values, especially the notion of

revaluing or coining values. But to understand elitism here is only to

emphasize the notion of difference in feeling and creation, the difference

between the will to power born to excess or lack, of abundance or inade-

quacy.

Heidegger reads Nietzsche's culture-critique as the thought of nihilism

conceived as "the inner logic of Western history, ''24 culminating in the

essence of modem technicity. This consummate nihilism, Nietzsche's

creative nihilism of "strength" opposing the desultory nihilism of exhausted

ideals, sees the state of vanishing values and seizes for itself the right to

remake values, to revalue values, and with this to attain to happiness. Thus

Heidegger recalls Nietzsche's ecstatic proclamation of the promise of

creators become conscious of themselves - who "think and feel at the same

250

time." In Nietzsche's words,

Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself,

according to its nature .... and it was

we

who gave and bestowed it. Only

we have created the world

that concerns man ....

we fail to recognize our

best power and underestimate ourselves... We are

neither as proud nor

as happy

as we might be. 25

Attaining to this proud consciousness in a radical revaluation of values that

is Nietzsche's legacy as the creative expression of nihilism gives rise to the

supreme danger of the human destining-foreclosing essence of modem

technology: the illusion that "everything man encounters exists only insofar

as it is his construct." (QT 27) In the

Beitriige zur Philosophie,

Heidegger

calls this consequent illusion of material and cultural mastery, the

"Entzauberung des Seienden" -

the loss of the enchanting force of every-

thing that is. 26 We have already seen that by way of the modem era's

technologically mediated, self-consummated enchantment

(Verzauberung)

of humanistic power, confirmed by sheer efficacy in doing, beings lose the

magic of being what they are, their thatness or emergent presence. For

Heidegger, far from the possibility of the smallest wonder, far from full

speech, far from bringing the "unsayable as such into a world" articulated in

poetic reticence, or from Heidegger's own preparatory thinking,

Nietzsche's cultural analytic of nihilism poses the possibility of the revalua-

tion of values as a

Machenschafi

of values consciously seized and ex-

pressed by the will to power. The darkening force of the age of modem

technology follows from its essence in the closure of metaphysics as an

expression of what Heidegger takes in Nietzsche's name to be the highest

will to power.

Because there are different schemas of inventive human possibility, will

to power for Nietzsche may be distinguished according to its original

genesis in each case. So far from being at its height as

domination,

which is

not to say

self-cultivation,

Nietzsche's esoteric conception of the highest

will to power articulates a consummately expressed letting-be not unlike

Heidegger's thought of

Gelassenheit.

And, I will suggest, if we are to think

Heidegger's expression of the shadowed possibility of redemption or

healing interior to the growing danger that is the essential darkness of

modem technology as a possibility, we cannot fail to reflect upon, to really

ponder and so to catch the evaluative, creative difference, the hierarchy of

feeling separating rancor and delight, glum preservation and blessing.

Countering the tenor of Heidegger's reading, Nietzsche's highest will to

power is

no

opposition to becoming, it does not conceive Being as fixed,

and by dint of its nature, the highest, creative Will to Power of overween-

ing, overwhelming abundance is foreign to the technological transformation

251

of the face of the world in the image of so much raw material for human

construction and ready reserve. The redemption Nietzsche's Zarathustra

traces in the dark morning sky is the redemption of becoming conceived in

the lightning-flash, in contrast with being, with fixity, that is to say: chance.

Instead of a designed cosmos or heaven of Reason, Zarathustra descries the

heavenly roll of the dice: "Over all things stands the heaven Accident, the

heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven Prankishness." (Z:III,

"Before Sunrise") Such a chance cosmos is nothing but chaos, under the

sign of forgiveness, the artifice of the cosmos absolved as artifice, the

lightning flash that illuminates becoming redeemed in opposition to the

fixity of being.

When we read Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, we cannot forget that

what he does is to ask "what kind of human being" could count as lord of

the earth, only to give an answer in terms of the lowest will to power: the

will that grows in rancor. Thus Nietzsche's Zarathustra contrasts the

"lowest" with the "highest species of all being." The highest, "the most

comprehensive soul, which can run and stray and roam farthest within

itself, the most necessary soul," is the soul of redeemed or innocent becom-

ing, crowned by the blessing of chance. Such a soul "out of sheer joy

plunges itself into chance - having being, [it] dives into becoming." (Z:III

O 19) In opposition to this is the lowest species or type of being, the

parasite, which Zarathustra also names "the lazy creepers, and all the

ravenous vermin." These latter correspond of course to Nietzsche's

celebrated, all-too-convenient rabble, whose ways are, we are told over and

over again, "dark ways, verily, on which not a single hope flashes anymore.

Let the shopkeeper rule where all that still glitters is - shopkeeper's gold...

Look how these people are now like shopkeepers: they pick up the smallest

advantage from any rubbish." (Z:III O 21)

Beyond the level of the banal or the everyday, there is still a temptation

to what Nietzsche calls

rancune,

the result of absorption and a lack of

artistic, creative distance. But if it is hard to read Heidegger reading

Nietzsche as he reads Nietzsche for his own purposes, it is harder to read

Nietzsche without knowing ourselves and our thinking, without being sure

of

our

purposes. How are we to read Nietzsche, who writes against himself,

as against his reader, the Nietzsche who writes for a rare understanding?

How are we to read as the bearers of, the seekers of such a rare or elite

understanding? How

close

must one be to oneself to understand Nietzsche' s

claim already cited from the

Gay Science

that "we are

neither as proud nor

as happy

as we might be?"

The mischief here is that the closer we are to ourselves, the more

ponderously we are likely to take Nietzsche's claims, his warnings, his

seductions, and the more likely we are to read the standard relativist schema

252

into Nietzsche's suggestion that "only we have created the world

that

concerns man." The

issue of rank order, the position of soul - self-disposi-

tion - the nature and kind of

Bestimmung

required by the self-cultivated

artist, the artist of the grand style, calls for an artist's aesthetic. This

aesthetic,

this

style,

for all its seriousness still needs the balancing, heighten-

ing cry of mirth and pleasure that knows itself and its limits and knows both

enough to say and to mean:

wholan!

Do we ever know ourselves truly

enough in what we do - we

men,

or is rather for this author: we

women

of

knowledge? If we were able to trace this esoteric connection further, would

we find that the highest mirth and pleasure yokes fool and poet, finds song

in the swan's choking death, and hears the first of music in that which sings

of no sadness but the "sadness of the most profound happiness," (GS 183)

or the joy which, Hrlderlin's Sophoclean insight tells us, is the ultimate

expression of tragedy? For whom?

Quoting his own

"gaya scienza"

in his description of the typology of

Zarathustra in

Ecce Homo,

Nietzsche describes the new philosophers, the

"men of knowledge," those of rare understanding conceived as he sought

them with his tragic project of philosophic overtures as the "nameless, self-

evident ... premature births of an as yet unproven future." For their very

possibility in coming to be, for our own corresponding possibility to emerge

as readers of Nietzsche's rare understanding, what is needed is what

Nietzsche calls

"great health."

Such health is not possessed but inherited

(or invented): it must be won and rewon and perpetually re-won because

one "gives it up again and again, and must give it up." The highest will to

power is distanced from rancor as its transformation on the basis of the

sunlike benediction of Zarathustra's cultivated abundant power, a power

that is not only beyond good and evil. Thus Zarathustra would have the love

of the neighbor transformed into the love of the friend: "I teach you the

friend in whom the world stands complete." In this artistic, aesthetic vision,

Nietzsche conceives the image of the "creative friend who always has a

complete world to give away." Such a vision as Nietzsche offers here

reflects the height and the consequences of gift and benediction. From this

tragic height alone may we see the advantage, see

from the advantage

of

becoming in the turning of heroic blessing: "And as the world rolled apart

from him, it rolls together again in circles for him, as the becoming of the

good through evil, as the becoming of purpose out of chance. ''27

Nietzsche's metaphysical nihilism: Adventavit asinus

For Heidegger, Nietzsche's thought concerning nihilism underscores the

emergent rule of the eminently technologizable, practical, material world by

253

pronouncing the wodd of the metaphysical or the suprasensory, the wodd

of the highest values dead or at an end, as nothing, that is, "without effec-

tive power. ''28 In an Hegelian turn, Heidegger finds Nietzsche's anti-

Platonic opposition to metaphysics remaining, necessarily "as does every-

thing "anti," held fast in the essence of that over against which it moves."

(WN 61) To see the truth of this claim beyond the movement of an

Hegelian - and so Nietzsche-antipathic - opposition, it is necessary to

consider Nietzsche's own insight into this same entanglement. 29 If

Nietzsche is not trapped by his own words, Heidegger's point has no

purchase. Yet if Nietzsche is trapped, we nevertheless find that like the

logical traps of his contradictory design concerning truth and the laws of

physics, Nietzsche knows the dialectical conversion so well in advance that

it is articulated in the turns of this very anticipation. Played with

Nietzsche's fingers, logic now works uncannily against itself, as self-

constructed and so ultimately, effective

self-deconstructive,

that is a logic of

expression styled to match and name nihilism. 3° This conversion is effected

by a reader-selective troping of the text that I name Nietzsche's

concinni-

ty 31 The reference to the musicality of Nietzsche's philosophical style seeks

to account for Nietzsche' s deliberately styled question of the meaning of the

past, of time and will, that is, again, of the relationship between being and

becoming. Beyond Derrida and Foucault, beyond Ricoeur and Gadamer, to

understand the project of Nietzsche's style, Nietzsche's musical challenges

or turns, Heidegger is a thinker who for all his deliberate

appropriation

remains a reader able to read Nietzsche as one who knows what philosophy

is, that is a fellow thinker, who shares the question of Being and of time, by

exceeding it.

While Nietzsche recognized the force of mass culture as an expression of

the will to technological power, this mass culture, the culture of nihilism, of

dominion over the earth is

not

the expression of the overman. As noted in

the preceding consideration of the elite or active character of the Will to

Power, dominion as such

cannot

be the proper expression of the overman.

The desire for dominion springs from the reactive desire born of a need for

power. Thus lacking, mass or contemporary Western culture gives rise to

the Zarathustran apothegm: "Man is something that must be overcome."

The will to power that yields the culture of nihilism must be understood as

more than the expression of a will to the revaluation of all values. The will

of average, reactive, or mass culture is a consequence of deficiency. This is

the will of the reactive, the weakened, the overshocked, the impotent. This

will to power works in the sphere of existent values, it is the triumph of the

ascetic ideal once again, and at all costs as Nietzsche describes this

metamorphosis in

The Genealogy of Morals.

But if Nietzsche classes the values of this ascetic will as slave values, it

254

must never be forgotten that he also tells us that these are the very trium-

phant values of our time. Although it works in the service of life, the ascetic

will refuses life. That is its paradox and for Nietzsche that is its ultimate,

extreme danger: the danger of decadence. The life-denying will of the slave,

of reactive humanity is not controlled by and can never be controlled by any

active or master will. By virtue of its orientation and the tenacity of its drive

for power, the reactive will is the most powerful will to power: "the weaker

dominate the strong again and again - the reason being that they are the

great majority, and they are also cleverer...'32 For Nietzsche, in a decadent

age,

nothing can last beyond the day after tomorrow, one species of man

excepted, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have the prospect

of continuing on and propagating themselves - they are the men of the

future, the sole survivors (BGE 262/182).

This reactive, measure, mediated species stands in opposition to the

(vanished and largely impossible) noble type: the sovereign individual. It is

only the sovereign individual who can command. Such a one, Heidegger

reminds us, first gives the law to one's self (as Nietzsche says in the

Genealogy of Morals, proposing this law and posing oneself before it, at

one's own cost, with no other bond than one's body). With such freedom,

such power to command is active revaluation or creation of values. The

sovereign, artist's revaluation grows from the active affirmation of itself,

the affirmation of a creative will.

The slave revaluation of values, on the other hand, is born of reaction: an

"inversion of the value-posing eye," (GM 36) which brings any active

power into its compass and so converts all pretensions to difference in the

reactive spirit of its self-assertion. Its entrepreneurial creativity is based on

denial of what is (this is realized by its technical, mechanical-manipulative

dominion over nature and itself).

For Heidegger, Nietzsche' s philosophy of Will to Power and the thought

of the Eternal Return is a valorization of the latter reactive scheme of world

domination, as the will to secure, "to seal Becoming with the character of

Being." (WP 330) Commenting on Rilke's poetic word of untoward

redemption, the protection (bergen) of our unshieldedess (Schutzlossein),

Heidegger recalls that "Secure, securus, sine cura means: without care. The

caring here has the character of purposeful self-assertion by the ways and

means of unconditional production. We are without such care only when we

do not establish our nature exclusively within the precinct of production and

procurement, of things that cannot be utilized and defended." (WP 120) 33 It

is from out of the spirit of this secure responsiveness that "Nietzsche

pondered the essence of that humanity which, in the destining of Being as

255

the will to power, is being determined toward the assuming of dominion

over the earth." (WN 98)

Heidegger's assertion here is fair enough in venture and vantage. The

venture of high responsibility of the will to power that could support such

an assumed dominion over the earth is the care of generosity in the extreme,

while this in its turn requires the vantage of power in excess. But this dyad

is a tricky one. Heidegger's point turns on a philosophical precision in

Nietzsche's thought on the will to power and it is troublesome because of

the easy equivocation which can collapse or fail to reflect the only indispen-

sable force of Nietzsche's insight into the opposed registers of expres-

sion/acquisition articulating the universality of will to power.'

As we have already seen, the technological project of "dominion over

that which is as such" (WN 99) cannot for Nietzsche be the active but only

the reactive project of the revaluation of values. Although Heidegger

understands the distinction between action and reaction as the distinction

between overflowing power as the

expression

of a will, he does not think

the predominance of desperate neediness as the

technic

of a will. The

essence of this distinction of the rule of a lack or a weakness corresponds to

its rank-ordering: if the historical destiny of inadequacy is its desire for

compensation and its triumph over all other values, it is not for that the

highest value. In the order of rank, the highest value is literally above

ordinary possibility; the hierarchy ascends from the esoteric to the exoteric.

Reading Heidegger's conception of nihilistic value and justice in the

light of Nietzsche's constitutional polarization of will to power, nihilism is

ambiguous because it corresponds to a devaluing of the highest values and

at the same time to a "countermovement to devaluing." (WN 68) The will

to power corresponds both to the expression of power and to the desire

for

power. The former, conceived as affirmation is only possible on the basis of

abundance, the source of expression, while the latter desire for power grows

out of the constraints of denial. In this last and most frequent circumstance

of the will to power, power must be understood as a lack, and will to power

thus understood is the occasion of preservative, accumulative desire. This

same ambivalence is again double valued in accordance with the origin of

revaluation. There is not only a revaluation of values that emerges on the

basis of weakness (self-preservation) but there is also a revaluation born of

strength (self-expression).

For Nietzsche, the fundamental tendency of organic being is a drive to

expression: "A living thing desires above all to vent its strength - life as

such is will to power -: self-preseation is only one of the indirect and

most frequent

consequences

of it." (BGE 14/26) The life of superabundance

seeks to express or expend its substance. Self-preservation may indeed

result from such expression butit is inherently related to expression as such

256

and indeed opposed to it. Expression expends power while preservation

saves or conserves power. To say that self-preservation can be (even a

frequent) result of such expression does not ameliorate its inherent incom-

patibility with the expression of power as such. One may not vent one's

power while at the same time keeping it in reserve (conserving or preserv-

ing it). It is this essential opposition that makes the valorization of a life of

abundant or creative self-expression fancifully romantic and ordinarily and

for the most part tactically vain. Nietzsche's characterization of an era of

revaluation fails to accord with the neediness of our times.

Opposing the aesthetic height of creative will to power, the contrary and

preservational impulse of reactive will to power moves into an encircling

sphere of world involvement and calculation which must always exclude

Heidegger's expression of Nietzsche's redemptive triad - blunting the

possibility of the hero's tragedy, unable to comprehend the satyr-play

between earth and sky of the demi-god, denying the world-ringing God. In

place of Nietzsche's hierarchic triad of aesthetic possibility, the reactive

mode of inventive, technological will to power seeks the satisfaction of

green pasture simplicity in its technological expression as dominion over

the world of nature. Given Nietzsche's well-known emphasis upon the all-

too-in the excessively, ever-still-merely-human, it is not possible to say of

all humans, as Heidegger seeks to categorize being human on the basis of

the consciousness that "God is dead," that humanity is thereby in Hegelian

fashion enabled to pass "over into another history that is higher, because in

it the principle of value-positing, the will to power, is experienced and

accepted expressly as the reality of the real, as the Being of everything that

is." (WN 95) Such a realization may be possible for creative beings, for

artists and as the self-realization of artists. But let us not forget that for

Nietzsche most of us, as knowers, whether we can claim to be artists or not,

"are unknown to ourselves. ''34

To know ourselves, to remember ourselves, to cry out of ourselves and to

laugh at ourselves is to begin to dance with light feet. It is this that is to

regain the delight one had as a child at play. But we cannot embrace the

romantic dilletante's or the more recent version of this romanticism in the

new-age ethos of just-so self-invention, nor follow Alexander Nehamas's

well intentioned reading of Nietzsche: Life as Literature. To give style to

°one's character as Nietzsche prescribes, is not only not prescribed for

everybody but is so reserved for a reason. That reason is pain, it is in this

way that thinking, that poetry is, here once again, hard. The laughter of the

Nietzschean artist may not be thought as a laughter without pain, without

terrible sacrifice, without cruelty to oneself and to others. Thus as Nietzsche

says this ideal of "superhuman wellbeing and benevolence ... will often

appear inhuman." (EH:Z, 2) Neither can the dance be thought without the

257

stumbling fall, the crippling repetition, the exhaustion of body and soul for

one end, neither can word be thought without the stammer, the never

exhausted failure of foolishness, and the empty echo. Even the music

Nietzsche celebrates is not immune where he can write of his anguish

concerning the fate of music that it can be and "has been done out of its

world-transfiguring, Yes-saying character, so that it is music of decadence

and no longer the flute of Dionysus," (EH:CW, 1; 317) and where even

music turns into decay, the hurdy gurdy song, silence is almost the only

pure tone and we find that even that is awkward. Again: only we have

created the world that concerns man. We have seen this ambiguity before in

speaking of the essence of poetry, the spirit of music as the saving power.

Here again the same ambiguous laughter of chance and delight - at what is

in its glory and its bitter misery, where glory itself is nothing save such

misery transformed by the "grand style," by heroic pride, by magnanimity

and affirmation in expressing, at disposing of the powers in oneself, by joy

- is also the only key to the "proud happiness" Nietzsche at the end of his

life would call the fierce halcyon joy of the creator: "the halcyon, the light

feet, the omnipresence of malice and exuberance." This Zarathustra is

"eloquence become music." (EH: Z, 6, p. 305) 35

For Nietzsche, "playing and brass," eloquence and vulgarity, delight and

horror may not be separated. More than that, "malice and exuberance,"

cruelty and creation go together and this is no accident of human earth-

bound creativity. Thus, Zarathustra echoes the spirit of Nietzsche's first

reflections on The Birth of Tragedy: "as deeply as man sees into life, he also

sees into suffering." (Z:III, ON 2) In a resonant, reader-evocative, reader

echoing concinnous turn, Nietzsche reminds us that even in such words

"there is much playing and brass. He that has ears to hear, let him hear."

What must be underlined here is the self-conscious teasing challenge, the

awareness of limit and prescription, of the absurd dominance of one's

convictions. For Nietzsche, "to put it in the words of an ancient Mystery:

adventavit asinus, pulcher et fortissimus." (BGE 8) Later in order to

introduce his notorious and lengthy fugue against "women as such" in the

same text, Nietzsche identifies such "convictions" as "signposts" to the

"great stupidity which we are ... the unteachable 'right down deep' ." (BGE

231) This perspective on one's convictions articulates the supreme nuance

between the illusion of truth and the truth of illusion. Only the latter is art

and only this can be music. Only the artist who deals in his illusions without

illusion, with irony and mirth, be this artist of life philosopher or dancer,

musician or poet-fool, can be the artist, the new technician of Nietzsche's

re-valuation of values. As Nietzsche's diamond device reminds us here, "if

your hardness does not wish to flash and cut and cut through, how can you

one day create with me?" (Z:III ON 29) For, when one philosophizes with a

258

hammer, after Nietzsche, post-Nietzsche as we are, are we not at last, at

least able to relinquish the current conviction, the cultural current of

conviction in our still-present fear of dissolution, that such a nihilism, such

a dominion, such a declared promise and intention towards a lordship over

the earth ("I am prepared

to rule the world.t)

is spoken, if only in part than

still at least this far:

in jest.

What more do we need, past, post-Nietzsche?

Not that Nietzsche does not "mean" to be taken seriously, that is not the

point here, but much rather that after an exchange, a dialectic, an incorpora-

tive rumination upon and with this philosopher of grand phrasings (and this

fine, resonant schema surely describes Nietzsche's good readers, such as we

are, all of us) we should be able to think back on the achievement of style to

wonder, to ask how it is, after all, that

words,

that

human beings can

overcome

themselves? If Nietzsche sings of the dancing star born to beings

that

play with stars

and who have always played with stars, whether

they

knew it or not, what he celebrates is the depth of the world, the lens of life.

This is the dancing shimmering light, the irridescent happiness, the song of

sadness welling on the surface, tears shining in the darkness, the sun's gold

on the fisherman's oar, light feet over an abyss.

Notes

1. Michael Theunissen, "Was heute ist. Ober Not und Notwendigkeit des

Umganges mit Heidegger," in

Martin Heidegger: Fragen an sein Werk. Ein

Symposion

(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977), p. 21.

2. Eric Blondel,

Nietzsche le corps et la culture

(Paris 1986).

3. For Blondel's suggestion see the first three chapters of his

Nietzsche le corps et

la culture,

trans. Sen Hand,

Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, Philosophy as

Philological Genealogy

(London: Athlone Press, 1991; Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1991). For Safranski, see Riidiger Safranski,

Wieviel

Wahrheit braucht der Mensch? Uber das Denkbare und das Lebbare.

(Minchen/Wien: Carl Hanser, 1990), p. 71.

4. "For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the

expression "being." We, however," concludes Heidegger's introductory quote

taken from Plato's

Sophist,

"who used to think we understood it, have now

become perplexed." Thus Heidegger's first paragraph for the first to the last

sentence in his introduction to

Being and Time,

expositing the "Question of the

Meaning of Being" accuses the whole philosophical tradition of forgetfulness

and trivializing.

Being and Time,

trans. Macquarrie and Robinson. (New York:

Harper & Row, 1962), quote p. 19/1 SZ

5. Martin Heidegger,

Nietzsche. Volume One: The Will to Power as Art,

trans. D.

F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 4. [Heidegger,

Nietzsche: I

(Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 12.] Hereafter, references to the German edition

will be made with a separating virgule following page references to the English

language translation.

6. Ibid.

259

7. Cf. David Allison's "Preface" to The New Nietzsche.

8. Heidegger, Nietzsche: 1, p. 4/p. 12.

9. Heidegger, Nietzsche: 1, p. xvi/p. 10.

10. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concern-

ing Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 33.

Henceforward abbreviated QT.

11. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Albert Hofstadter, Poetry,

Language, Thought, p. 52. Henceforward abbreviated as WA, with page

numbers inserted into the text.

12. "Enframing...threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the supposed

single way of revealing, and so thrusts man in the danger of the surrender of

his free essence [but] it is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost

indestructible belongingness of human being within the granting may come to

light, provided that we for our part, begin to pay heed to the coming to

presence of technology." (QT 32).

13. "On the one hand, Enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering

that blocks every view into the coming-to-pass of revealing and so radically

endangers the relation to the essence of truth. On the other hand, Enframing

comes to pass for its part in the granting that lets man endure...that he may be

the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the coming to presence

of truth." (QT 33)

14. Heidegger, "...Poetically Man Dwells..." in Poetry, Language, Thought, p.

213. Henceforward abbreviated as P.

15. Heidegger, "The Turning" in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 47.

Henceforward abbreviated QT/T.

16. Heidegger, "...das ich nicht gegen die Technik bin..." p. 25 in "Das Fernseh

Interview" in Antwort." Martin Heidegger im Gesprgich, hrsg. G. Neske, E.

Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988).

17. T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland: V.

18. Hrlderlin, "Der Einzige" Erster Fassung, trans. Richard Sieburth, "I never

achieve the measure I wish. But a god knows when the best I wish comes

true."

19. Hrlderlin, Patmos, Bruchstticke der spiteren Fassung, trans. Michael Ham-

burger, "For to be pure is a skill, a life that has a heart, in the presence of such

a face, and outlasts the middle. Buch much is to be avoided."

20.

Ja, die Friihlinge brauchten dich wohL Es muteten manche

Sterne dir zu, daft du sie spiirtest. Es hob

sich eine Woge heran im Vergangenen, oder

da du voriiberkamst am gerffneten Fenster,

gab eine Geige sich hin. Das alles war Auftrag.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: I.

21. Hrlderlin, Patmos, trans. M. Hamburger, "And there's no harm if some of it is

lost."

22. Because such a deliberate philosophy of opposition as Nietzsche's elicits

denigration in the established tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to

Wittgenstein, Davidson and even Derrida, Nietzsche's voice is heard in the

tones of fancy or poetry. On the other side, Nietzsche lacks a philosophical

voice because of the resonant impoverishment of tradition. Hence Nietzsche

finds himself closest to the Presocratic thinker known for his own esoteric

darkness: Heraclitus, while, let it be noted, the issue of value must be decided

260

between the two names Anaximander and Empedocles.

23. It is relevant that this elitism has found little correspondence, hardly any

recognition or confirming, echoing resonance within the leagues even of

Nietzsche's most fervent interpreters.

24. Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead," in William Lovitt,

trans. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York:

Harper & Row, 1977), p. 67. Henceforward abbreviated as WN, with page

numbers inserted into the text.

25. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 301. trans. W. Kaufmann (Random House: New

York, 1974), p. 242. Henceforward abbreviated as GS, with page numbers

inserted into the text.

26. Heidegger, Beitrige zur Philosophie. Vom Ereignis (Frankfurt a/M.: Kloster-

mann, 1989), p. 107.

27. Z:I, "On Love of One's Neighbor." Modified translation.

28. Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead," p. 61. Henceforward

abbreviated WN.

29. The value of Heidegger's claim of entanglement is not disputed here: it is

patently and in Heidegger's own sense: correct.

30. "Those who fancy themselves free of nihilism perhaps push forward its

development most fundamentally." p. 63. This "uncanny guest" heralding the

end of modernity's ambitious adventure in history.

31. See my "On Nietzsche's Concinnity: An Analysis of Style." Nietzsche-Studien

19 (1990):59-80).

32. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth and

New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 76.

33. For Heidegger, "future thinking" must be tempered by the character of what he

names, counting on the resonance of his earlier notion of anticipatory resolve,

or authenticity a "high responsibility." This "high responsibility" may be

understood as a charge linking the early Heidegger's expression of "care"

(Sorge) in Being and Time with his later more ambivalent expression of saving

or protection, security. Heidegger cites Rilke's unfinished poem WP 99. The

relevant German text runs as follows

...was uns schliefllich birgt,

ist unser Schutzlossein und daft wirs so so

ins Offne wandten, da wirs drohen sahen,

um es, im weitesten Umkreis irgendwo,

wo das Gesetz uns anriihrt, zu bejahen.

- Rilke, "improvisierte Verse, cited in Heidegger, "Wozu Dichter," Holzwege,

(Frankfurt a.M.: Klosterman, 1950), p. 273.

34. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface. Even philosophers of the

future, corresponding to Nietzsche's temporary schema, cannot always be

conscious of what is created by their own artistic temperament or that their

own cultivatedly aesthetic values are the fruit of both body and mortal soul.

The thing about this kind of self-knowledge is that it excludes itself in its

achievement.

35. Ecce Homo, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": 6, p. 305 "In every word he con-

tradicts, this most Yes-Saying of all spirits; in him all opposites are blended

into a new unity. The highest and the lowest energies of human nature, what is

sweetest and most frivolous, and most terrible wells forth from one fount with

immortal assurance."